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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: combjelly who wrote (379800)4/22/2008 5:29:11 PM
From: i-node  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1578445
 
It was developed in the 1960s. Old languages like FORTRAN and COBOL have aspects. But, languages are tools. They aren't a fashion statement.

They are tools, and some are better than others.

Now, I've written many thousands of lines of COBOL, FORTRAN, and even DIBOL in my years, but more C/C++ than that. There is no excuse for writing a NEW application in COBOL today. Neither is there an excuse for writing a new application in MUMPS. As a maintenance task, I wouldn't wish MUMPS on my worst enemy, any more than I would develop a business application in Assembler Language.

Aside from the obvious syntactical problems with MUMPS, it lacks even WEAK typing and lacks any class facility. In the 60s and 70s, we used such languages, but today, it is astonishing that anyone would.

They aren't a fashion statement, but if you think the only difference between MUMPS and Java or C++ or C# is fashion, you're [once again] talking out of your league. It is hard to imagine ANYONE making a serious commitment to a language like this today. You would really have to be a government agency to make a decision like that, I would think.



To: combjelly who wrote (379800)4/22/2008 6:28:10 PM
From: Taro  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1578445
 
I used to do my college stuff (mostly closed loop control and servo system models) in Algol (super fast optical tape readers) back in the late 60s. Some in Fortran (punched card decks) as well on our IBM 7094.

Taro